Hi ,I'm trying Mint Debian mostly using the Mate desktop (Cinnamon is proving to be too buggy at the moment on my computer),I have the fglrx driver installed through synaptic,and Compiz plugins also installed,but no matter what effect I select in the Compiz control panel,I get nothing,no wobbly windows,no desktop expo,nothing .Clearly I must be missing something stupid,can you please point me in the right direction?

That half worked,as compiz was started as window manager,and its effects kinda worked,but the terminal got stuck on some operation while enabling plugins or something like that,and the new settings didn't stick:upon logging out and then back in,or rebooting,compiz was disabled again.I kinda fixed it following this advice

in a terminal type “mateconf-editor” When the editor opens:Go to /desktop/mate/session/required_components/windowmanager and replace "marco" with "compiz".

from this tutorial http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/919now things work reasonably well,apart from the fact that Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Alt+Tab no longer work:any ideas on how can I fix that? Hopefully is something silly that I am overlooking,like setting the correct key bindings or something.

Unless I'm misunderstanding your post, I think I know what is wrong. Running "compiz --replace" in the terminal does not actually hang. The problem is that you should be running "compiz --replace &" to make the new process independent from the terminal. Without that the process continues to run in the terminal and will terminate when you close the terminal.

But if you want to run compiz at startup, you should just put "compiz --replace" in your startup applications. Changing the window manager setting to compiz in the mateconf-editor does not actually start compiz (don't ask me why) - it just makes sure that marco window manager doesn't start as well (marco doesn't play well with compiz).

Once again,thanks a lot That did the trick,now Compiz is working and stays enabled as the preferred windows manager in Mate.On a side note,I still think that either more detailed instructions on how to enable and run properly Compiz in Mint (when choosing the Mate desktop) should go in the release notes,or these tweaks should be more automated once one installs the Compiz plugins package from repository.

3- Go to Startup Applications click on add and in the name field write "compiz" and in the command field enter "compiz --replace"(without the punctuation) click on Add again then Close. This is to make compiz start automatically on next logins.

4- To stop that high CPU usage run in terminal “mateconf-editor”. When the editor opens go to /desktop/mate/session/required_components/windowmanager and replace "marco" with "compiz".

5- To change window decorations install gconf-editor then run it (In terminal run "gconf-editor"). Navigate to /apps/metacity/general/theme and set the value to your Metacity theme name. Mint’s default is Mint-X.